Marilyn Buck,
Former Political Prisoner

Marilyn Buck was imprisoned
for 25 years in the united states for her anti-imperialist actions carried out in support of national liberation,
women's liberation, social and economic justice. While in prison she developed uterine cancer, which resisted treatment. Seriously ill, she was released on July 15, 2010. She died a couple of weeks later, on August 3.

In the 60's Marilyn participated in protests against racism and the Vietnam
war. In 1967 she became part of Students for a Democratic Society. Marilyn
became part of a radical filmmaking and propaganda collective, showing
the films as an organizing aid at community meetings, high school groups,
workers' committees and in the streets. She also participated in international
solidarity groups supporting the Vietnamese, Palestinians, and the Iranian
struggle against the Shah. She worked in solidarity with Native Americans,
Mexicano and Black liberation struggles.

As a direct result of all of this activity, she became a target of COINTELPRO.
In 1973, she was arrested and convicted of buying two boxes of bullets.
Accused of being a member of the BLA, she sentenced to 10 years, the longest
sentence ever given for such an offense at the time. In 1977 she was granted
a furlough and never returned, joining the revolutionary clandestine movement.
In 1985 she was captured and and faced 4 separate court trials. She was
charged with conspiracy to support and free PP/POWs and to support the New
Afrikan Independence struggle through expropriations. In 1988 she was indicted
for conspiracy to protest and alter government policies through use of violence
against government and military buildings and received an additional 10
years for conspiracy to bomb the Capitol.

As Judy Greenspan explains:

Marilyn died today not in the hospital but at Soffiyah Elijah’s house, her close friend and attorney with her friends around her. The federal bureau of prisons and the U.S. Criminal injustice system killed Marilyn by denying her adequate medical care, careful diagnoses, and timely treatment for her cancer. They allowed the uterine cancer to spread until it was inoperable. And they made her serve every single day of her sentence that they could for her “heinous crimes” of actively supporting the Black Liberation struggle, aiding in the escape of comrade Assata Shakur, participating in military political actions against U.S. Wars at home and abroad and remaining defiant and opposed to the U.S. Imperialist racist system every day that she was inside the belly of the beast. Marilyn Buck, Presente!

Along with political prisoners David Gilbert and Laura Whitehorn, Marilyn
was interviewed by comrades from the Resistance in Brooklyn group.
These interviews were all published in the booklet Enemies of the
State, available from Kersplebedeb. Click here for more information.

Marilyn has also won the poetry prize from the PEN Prison Writing program,
and a booklet of her poems entitled Rescue the Word was published
in 2001. (Unfortunately, this booklet is now out of print.)

In her own words: "I am also a strong advocate to free political prisoners/POWs
and also to take on the U.S. prison plantation system. Being a political
prisoner is not my only work. I think it is wasteful and short-sighted
to relegate political prisoners to only working around themselves. Just
because we are prisoners does not mean that we have lost our reasoning,
analytical powers. We still have a world views based on long years of experience.
Too many, even in our political movements would prefer to relegate us to
museum pieces, objects of campaigns perhaps, but not political subjects
and comrades in an ongoing political struggle against imperialism, oppression,
and exploitation. The state tries to isolate us, true; that makes it all
the more important not to let it succeed in its proposition. We fight for
political identity and association from here; it is important that political
forces on the outside not lose sight of why the state wants to isolate and
destroy us, and therefore fight to include us in political life — ideological
struggle, etc. In many struggles many militants have been exiled yet they
have still been considered part of their struggles, not merely objects.
We, we here, could be considered internally exiled. Don’t lock us into roles
as objects or symbols."

In 2004 a CD of Marilyn's poetry - Wild Poppies - a poetry jam across
prison walls - was released by the San Francisco-based Freedom Archives.
It contains forty six poems (32 of which are written by Marilyn) read by
over twenty different poets, and provides a wonderful testimony to her politics
and her spirit. This CD can be ordered from Kersplebedeb via the Leftwingbooks.net website.

An excerpt of a video interview with Marilyn in prison in 1989 has been put on Vimeo by Freedom Archives: